From soaring demand for children’s mental-health support to economic insecurity and digital harms, young people in Britain are being failed by systems meant to protect them. It’s time to confront the legal and social failures behind a generation too often dismissed as ‘whingeing’, says Dr Raj Joshi

The older generation has developed a familiar reflex. Whenever young people speak – about mental health, about insecurity, about the sheer difficulty of navigating the world they’ve inherited – they’re met with the same dismissive refrain: stop whingeing. Toughen up. We had it harder. 

It’s a cultural reflex, almost instinctive, and it’s profoundly dishonest. Young people today are reporting harm, and the state – both domestically and internationally – has already recognised that harm in law. What’s missing is the political and societal will to act on it.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has argued that young people have been seriously let down because the right support was not there when they needed it, particularly around mental health, education and employment. His comments reflected what the data has been screaming for years: young people are being failed.

The scale of the crisis in young people’s mental health is staggering. In England, 1,048,965 children had an active referral to Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services in 2024–25– roughly one in ten children, and the first time the total has passed one million. One million. Roughly one in ten children. It’s the highest number ever recorded.

Youth charities estimate that, based on an average 115,000 new referrals per month in the 12 months to June 2026, a further 3.9 million referrals could be made by August 2029 if current trends continue. These projections describe the lived reality of a generation trying to access help that is simply unavailable.

The most damning statistic is this: 29% of children had their referrals closed before treatment in 2024–25. On that basis, Future Minds estimates that more than 1.1 million children and young people could be referred without receiving treatment by the end of this Parliament. They are placed on a list, assessed as needing help, and then quietly removed from the system without support. If an adult were treated this way, it would be a scandal. But when it happens to young people, it’s dismissed as unfortunate but inevitable, as though their suffering were somehow less urgent.

Waiting times tell the same story. The average wait across all children referred to CYPMHS in 2024–25 was 128 days – more than four months. For many, the wait is far longer. For some, the wait ends in crisis. Burnham has long highlighted the link between youth mental health and the criminal justice system. Speaking in Parliament in 2012, he cited evidence that about 70% of young people in the criminal justice system had an undiagnosed or untreated mental-health problem. It’s difficult to imagine a clearer indictment of a system that intervenes only once the damage is irreversible.

And yet, despite this mountain of evidence, older generations continue to insist that young people are simply too sensitive. They say this with a confidence that borders on arrogance, as though the world of the 1970s or 1980s bore any resemblance to the world young people inhabit today. It’s a comforting fiction, allowing them to avoid confronting the uncomfortable truth: that the structures they built, defended and benefited from have become hostile to the young.

The economic landscape alone is enough to dispel the myth of youthful fragility. Young people are disproportionately affected by the housing crisis, alongside insecure work and continuing cost-of-living pressures. A 2024 UK Biobank study published in Nature Human Behaviour found evidence of causal links running both ways between poverty and some mental illnesses. The wider picture is a vicious cycle in which disadvantage can worsen mental health and some mental disorders can, in turn, deepen disadvantage. Young people are navigating that landscape while older generations continue to insist that the problem is attitude rather than circumstance.

Add to this the digital environment – an ecosystem of cyberbullying, algorithmic exploitation, AI-enabled abuse and relentless comparison – and the picture becomes even clearer. Young people are navigating adolescence within a technological landscape designed to manipulate their attention, their emotions and their behaviour. No previous generation has lived under such conditions. Telling them to “toughen up” is dismissive and intellectually dishonest.

Beyond these cultural and economic realities lies something even more important: the law. Young people’s rights are codified in domestic legislation and international treaties, and those rights are being breached.

The Children Act 1989 imposes a general duty on local authorities to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need by providing services appropriate to their needs. The Children Act 2004 requires local authorities to make arrangements promoting cooperation with relevant partners with a view to improving children’s wellbeing, including physical and mental health and protection from harm. These are legal obligations. Where children in need are left for months without necessary support, or referrals are closed without treatment, serious questions arise about whether those duties are being fulfilled. When young people in crisis are left to deteriorate until they enter the criminal-justice system, the protective purpose of the framework has plainly failed.

Section 140 of the Mental Health Act 1983 requires integrated care boards to notify local social-services authorities of hospitals where arrangements exist for urgent admissions and facilities specially suitable for patients under 18. It therefore creates specific duties around urgent and age-appropriate hospital provision.

The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 recognises children as victims in their own right where they see, hear or experience the effects of domestic abuse and are related to the abuser or victim. The Act’s definition of abuse includes controlling or coercive behaviour and psychological or emotional abuse. Yet many of these young people find themselves waiting months for specialist intervention, if they receive it at all.

The Equality Act 2010 prohibits discrimination in access to services. Section 149 requires public authorities to have due regard to the need to advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who don’t. Where failures in mental-health provision disproportionately affect groups sharing protected characteristics, public bodies must consider those equality duties.

The Human Rights Act 1998 brings the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law through the Convention rights set out in Schedule 1. Article 2 protects the right to life. Article 3 prohibits inhuman or degrading treatment. Article 8 protects private and family life, including aspects of physical and psychological integrity. Article 14 prohibits discrimination. When young people in crisis are left without care, these rights can be engaged and, in sufficiently serious circumstances, violated.

The UK is a party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 3 requires that the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration. Article 24 recognises the child’s right to the highest attainable standard of health. Article 19 requires protection from all forms of physical or mental violence. Article 12 enshrines the right of children to express their views in matters affecting them. Persistent failures to take children’s interests, health, safety and voices seriously can place the UK in breach of its international obligations.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognises the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health and requires states to take steps towards its full realisation. The UN Sustainable Development Goals explicitly include mental health and wellbeing under SDG 3 and inclusive, equitable quality education under SDG 4.

The law, the moral case and the statistical evidence all point in the same direction. What remains unclear is why older generations continue to insist that young people are simply complaining.

Burnham’s government has announced a £343 million redesign of mental-health services, including 100 community mental-health centres and 59 mental-health emergency departments. It’s a significant intervention, and it signals a shift towards a preventative state rather than a crisis-response model. Burnham has described the programme as “just the start”. Future Minds warns that support is failing to keep pace with rising need and that access standards remain inadequate.

The challenge now is cultural as much as political. Older generations must confront the reality that their dismissive rhetoric is inaccurate and harmful. It perpetuates a cycle in which young people’s suffering is trivialised, their rights ignored and their futures compromised. It allows institutions to continue failing them without consequence. And it reinforces a narrative in which young people are blamed for the very conditions they are forced to endure.

What gets dismissed as “whingeing” is a generation reporting a crisis. Young people are navigating a world more unstable, more demanding, and more psychologically corrosive than any previous generation. They are entitled – legally, morally, politically – to protection, support, dignity and a voice.

The question is whether the rest of society is willing to listen.

Dr Raj Joshi is a senior barrister and prominent civil rights advocate whose career spans frontline legal practice, regulatory reform, and international justice. Twice named among the ‘Top 10 Asian Lawyers in the UK’ and listed in the ‘100 Most Influential Asians in the UK’, he has appeared before major inquiries, including giving evidence in the Stephen Lawrence case, and served as Chair of the Society of Black Lawyers. A former Adjudicator to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, Dr Joshi has advised ministers, helped shape legal protocols, and represented the UK in international legal forums. 

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